Another day of almost doing the thing

It’s Sukkot at present, and I’m given to understand that many Jewish schools are closed, thus explaining the presence of about 40 young ultra-Orthodox girls and a few of their much younger brothers at the rink today. I’m an easier crier, and these girls in their tights and dresses and sweaters, helping each other stumble across the ice as wordless, lyrical music played brought me close.

They watched me as I got ready, hoping maybe that I was any good, what with my own skates and the tight leggings. I don’t know if they saw Jewishness in my features and, if they did, if it mattered to them. But despite being secular and from a mixed home, I was moved to be so entirely amongst people at least somewhat like me.

The ice was soup because it was abruptly 82 out, and the rink is under a bubble on a roof. I could have done more if I hadn’t been so unnerved by puddles, but maybe I am always looking for something to be unnerved by. I think on Sunday when my instructor offers to help me to get to our section of the ice for class, I should tell him I think I should try to do it myself.

I do better when someone is metaphorically holding my hand and telling me I can do this and am allowed to do this. Subsequently, I have a lots of thoughts — that would be more comfortable in any other week in America’s national life — about the notion of the ordeal and my need to be good and, also, how easy it is to be generous with people instead of cruel, even when you’re pushing them.

It’s interesting to me, how often people mistake cruelty for exactitude. Certainly, I have.

But not here. Strangers chatted with me and offered help and encouragement yet again today. More than anything, people in this whole ice skating thing have been kind to me. I’ve done a lot of very challenging things in my life, that were hard and orderly and lonely, and quite appropriately involved coaching and training and self-discipline and all the brutality those things can entail. I tend to be fond of it. I am, after all, quite brutal with myself by nature.

But while I will accept that during those other endeavors — at 16 and at 36 (we won’t discus my 20s because, mostly, you wouldn’t understand) — I was not really able to accept kindness, I must also note that there was also much less on offer. And there was, frankly, no reason for it. You can make someone push themselves far beyond what they think is possible by telling them they are good just as readily — and maybe more so — than by being cold, or telling them they don’t.

It’s hard to explain how grateful I am at the warmth I find on the ice… and how much I wonder if this is tragic. Shouldn’t there have always been more kindness along the way?